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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26070520">Terra Incognita</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0'>Calyps0</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars Sequel Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Curses, F/M, Fluffy, Goddesses, Gods, Happy Ending, Mild body horror?, Mythology-Inspired, Not too angsty, One Shot, Sweet, also i got the title from a jeopardy clue, because i am very unoriginal, ben is cursed by snoke, curse, rey is the god of sleep, this is just a genderbent hades and persephone knockoff</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 12:35:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,629</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26070520</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She is the scion of sleep, and she comes in the form of his dreams.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Terra Incognita</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She is the scion of sleep, and she comes in the form of his dreams.</p><p>One morning he awakens to the rich taste of berries on his tongue. The next it is to the fresh scent of roses in the air. The one after it is to sharp mint on his breath.</p><p>One time next week it is to his softened fingertips, as if they had traced at something smooth for hours.</p><p>Once it is to tears on his cheeks, and a sprig of holly enclosed in his fist.</p><p>The tears are not his but he cries them anyway, and when they reach his lips they taste of sugar, not salt.</p><p>~</p><p>He is not quite a man but she is a god, and so he cannot subvert the tricks that lead to the bursts of sweetness on his tongue, he cannot protect himself from the whimsy of her gifts. He cannot suppress a shiver when she gifts him winter storms to cool his nightmares, he cannot stop himself from crying when she soothes the desert of his past with summer rains.</p><p>~</p><p>He would wonder why she has chosen to give him these gifts, but it would not do to guess as to a god’s choices. It could be out of pity. Maybe boredom. Or even (and his—<em>not heart exactly, but something like it</em>—clenches) maybe it’s out of love.</p><p>Perhaps she had chosen him at random. Perhaps she is a god who gifts all men with frightening pasts something to soothe their dreams, soften their mouths, and smooth their brows.</p><p>He wants to think he has been chosen.</p><p>But vanity is a sin, so he doesn’t think, and he doesn’t wonder.</p><p>~</p><p>He cannot discern the shape of her, exactly, as she inhabits that foggy dreamscape that passes between his ears each time he lays down his head.</p><p>Sleep is not always easy to find. But lately it seems as if she is guiding him, so he follows—down, down, down.</p><p>She is a force, a thing, a blinding entity, and he can only make out vague features through the snowstorm-white of her. A pair of blushed, apple-red lips. The smoky hazel of her eyes. A silken tress of her honey-glossed hair.</p><p>She will look at him and smile, but he cannot smile back. Each time he wakes he is given another gift, something else to ponder over for the rest of the day.</p><p>The taste of apples. The smell of smoke. The sticky sweetness of honey, gliding down his throat.</p><p>~</p><p>The days grow longer but he yearns for long nights where he can wrap himself up in the summer warmth of her. His room has become a vibrant, flourishing thing, filled with the scents and souvenirs from his nighttime slumberings.</p><p>Roses, peaches, a daisy chain. Berries and twigs and feathers and leaves. Acorns and seeds and ripe fruit pits.</p><p>Apple slices, wisteria, ambrosia-sweet jars of jam.</p><p>Everything glints at him. He blinks as if only now realizing his room has become a glasshouse. There are green vines loping up his legs. His lips are stained cherry-red. A soft, wheat-braided crown has woven itself into his hair.</p><p>She is making him into something else. He is being shaped by a god.</p><p>His mouth is dry, but it tastes like rain.</p><p>~</p><p>It is not always tangible things she leaves.</p><p>His dreams are not all summer haze and morning dew. He has awoken too many times lately with tear tracks like fresh-trod snow, and a grief that doubles him over.</p><p>It startles him.</p><p>(He hasn’t felt <em>grief</em> for years.)</p><p>Too many times she has given him anger. He wakes with his muscles tensed to snap, and bits of sea glass crushed between his fists.</p><p>(He hasn’t felt <em>anger</em> for years.)</p><p>Too many times he wakes up with fierce joy, and there are sunflowers trailed across his neck, and his cheeks ache from smiling.</p><p>(He cannot remember <em>joy</em>.)</p><p>Too many times he’s been woken by want, and the straining of his skin and the heat licking at his spine is accompanied by the tide in his blood, rushing and roaring in his veins.</p><p>(He cannot remember <em>lust</em>.)</p><p>Too many times he’s been awoken by the bitter sting of loneliness. She leaves him nothing on those days, intangible or not.</p><p>(But <em>loneliness</em>—that he remembers.)</p><p>~</p><p>One night when the nightmares return full-force and he has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming, he sees her as a woman dressed in blinding white—but not so blinding he cannot focus on her. She fades into his vision and approaches him.</p><p><em>Do you know why I have gifted these things to you?</em> she asks him, and her voice is unearthly the first time he hears it. It rings like lapping water and he wants to clap his hands around his ears.</p><p>But he doesn’t.</p><p><em>No,</em> he says. <em>Yes,</em> he thinks.</p><p><em>I am giving you what you cannot feel</em>, she says curiously, <em>but I don’t know why you can’t. You’re just a man. And I am a god. Why should you not be able to feel?</em></p><p>He stares, but she truly does not know.</p><p><em>Can I show you?</em> he asks softly.</p><p>She nods.</p><p>He slips his shirt up—up over the breadth of his shoulders, up past his collarbones, up where it swallows his head—but he knows she cannot look anywhere but his chest.</p><p>There is a hole there, right where—on a normal man—his heart should be.</p><p><em>There was another god before you,</em> he says. <em>He wanted me as a warrior. I betrayed him, and he cursed me. He took from me the only thing I had ever wanted.</em></p><p><em>Death,</em> she supplies.</p><p><em>Yes,</em> he answers her. <em>He took my heart so I could not, and my feelings went with it.  </em></p><p>She looks at him and traces her fingers around the wound. It doesn’t hurt. Her touch doesn’t feel like anything at all. Her skin is like starlight.</p><p>The wound mends itself. And as suddenly as rainfall his feelings come rushing back into himself, restored, and it is so powerful it knocks him to his knees.</p><p><em>It’s too good to be true</em>, he thinks.</p><p>And it is.</p><p><em>It won’t stay like this,</em> she says, <em>not when you’re awake.</em></p><p>And so she holds him until morning comes, and then his eyes blink open.</p><p>The hole is still there, and emotion has left him, but there is a tingle in his fingers. He thinks it reminds him of hope.</p><p>~</p><p>It gets harder and harder to distinguish between daytime and dreamtime now, especially now that their landscapes are becoming increasingly blurred. Her dreamland is filled with forests and syrup-sweet air, and his room is now so green it takes him a few moments to realize he has awoken.</p><p>Every night she heals the hole in his heart and presses her fingers to his chest, and emotions swirl around him like a maelstrom.</p><p>Every night, she gives him something else.</p><p>A touch, a taste, a feeling, a kiss.</p><p>When he wakes one morning he feels the press of lips against his own, and he stays in bed all day in an attempt to feel hers again.</p><p>He sleeps more now than he ever has, and she greets him as if he is not a man at all.</p><p>He doesn’t know why this god should want him. But she gives him her everything, her heart, and her time.</p><p><em>There are no others</em>, he realizes now. No other men whose dreams she soothes, no other ears that hear her whispers, no other bodies that know the plush give of her own.</p><p>It is just him.</p><p>~</p><p>He is drowning in her gifts. Plants, flowers, berries, jewels. His room is a canopy of the forest, and then some. She has taken lately to giving him stars, so that when he awakens they hover above his bed like diamonds-beads of light.</p><p>She gives him the moon, next, and then a blanket of midnight. It curls around his shoulders like a cape.</p><p>Comets she tangles in his hair. Rosebuds she presses to his cheeks. Reflections of the sea she pins to the line of his neck. Alabaster she sews into his skin.</p><p>Slowly, she is making him divine.</p><p>~</p><p>He has nothing to give her in exchange. Nothing at all. He glows like a slivered star—a cape of night at his back, flowers at his cheeks, berries at his lips, vines at his feet and hands. Every breath he inhales is tinged with the citrusy-sweetness of her.</p><p>And he still has nothing to give.</p><p>He is just a man with a curse and a hole in his heart, and his dreams are not enough to satisfy her.</p><p>But she is a god and she tells him as much, and he can give her his everything, <em>can’t he</em>, if she wants it.</p><p>He asks her what he must do, and she tells him.</p><p>~</p><p>That morning he wakes. There is a bead of light in his palm.</p><p>He presses it to the mattress, centered where his heart should go.</p><p>He closes his eyes, and gives himself over to her.</p><p>~</p><p>He sleeps until his body decays under the garden she has woven him. He sleeps until his skeleton is peppered with rose petals and precious gems and seedlings and vines. He sleeps until his bones tangle with tree roots, he sleeps until they bear fruit that drop between the clatter of his ribs. He sleeps until there are dewdrops flooding his eye sockets, until starlight eats away even his memory.</p><p>But he is not there in that slumber, in that manmade room with a god’s garden.</p><p>No, he is with her in dreamland—where he has given her the only thing he had to offer.</p><p>
  <em>Eternity.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! Please let me know if you enjoyed &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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